KERRY CLARE'S MITZI BYTESPublished last spring, this alternately wry and uproarious novel has so many pleasures. A key one is its endorsement of women’s writing as a tradition and as a virtual community. Clare’s protagonist reads To the Lighthouse for her book club and luxuriates in the privacy of her home office as the “room of one’s own” Woolf prescribes for women writers. Alongside Woolf, in a sweetly eclectic literary pairing, is the influence of Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, which lends Clare’s novel some key plot and thematic elements (not to mention a conveniently located dumbwaiter).

Years ago, Sarah Lundy funneled her post-divorce identity crisis into a blog. As “Mitzi Bytes,” she shared comically provocative tales of her dating escapades. Her online writing garnered a large and (mostly) supportive community of readers as well as three book publications, but she has kept her real-life identity secret. Now happily re-married and the mother of two small girls, Sarah panics when an irate message lands in her in-box, accusing her of pilfering from other people’s experiences to illustrate her blog musings. According to her correspondent, these are not Sarah’s stories to tell: “Who do you think you are?”

This echo of an Alice Munro title is perhaps not accidental. At many points in Mitzi Bytes I thought of Munro’s nuanced portrayals of women’s relationships, the friendships and rivalries, the mirrors and foils. Clare captures how particular transitions, and most acutely becoming a mother, create potential crises in long-established friendships. Opinions about child-rearing, the mythical “balancing” of life commitments, or even trivial household organization can harden into smugness and judgment. At one point, Sarah and her two closest friends bond over a shared befuddlement at a “Simple Living” blog that features a three-part series on kitchen drawer contents. There are shades of the maternity ward scene in Who Do You Think You Are?, where new mothers vie to describe how they organize their kitchen cabinets while the protagonist and her newfound friend satirize their concern. The juxtaposition of women who lean in to domesticity with those who chafe at its excesses is familiar, but Clare brings a freshly sardonic approach.

Like Maria Semple or Meg Wolitzer, Clare has a talent for ruefully zany humour rooted in acute observations of family life and her characters’ painful recognition of their own failings. By combining third-person narration with a selection of Sarah’s “Mitzi” entries, Clare nicely captures the way any individual contains multitudes. Clare points out that while we accept (mostly) our own complexities and contradictions, we pin other people—even the ones closest to us—into simpler, more convenient versions of themselves. For Sarah, this is most evident in her impression, challenged over the course of the novel, that her husband is largely transparent.

Clare has fun with parents’ laser focus on the needs of our own offspring and our outsized view of their (and, frankly, our) entitlements, as with the mother a Mitzi post describes vigorously advocating for her sensitive “orchid” child’s right to be included in a birthday party. Meanwhile, a child’s more pressing need for accommodation is treated as an infringement worthy of protest. After a request to prohibit additional school lunch ingredients so that a highly allergic girl would not need to eat alone in a closet, “Several families showed up with jars of Skippy peanut butter and loaves of bread, pulled their kids out of class, and proceeded to distribute slapped-together sandwiches, which they ate in a circle while singing ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’” (262).

Clare is also attentive to how this kind of privileged parenting is bolstered by reliance on other women’s underpaid work. In her serio-comic depiction of the skirmishes between a neighbour and the nanny she employs (and complains about), I thought of Angie Abdou’s Between. Both writers provide thoughtful attention to the perspectives of Filipina women who care for Canadian families while their own children grow up without them, dependent on the money they send home. Cherry, the novel’s nanny, has a room of her own—but it lacks windows and a door that locks. Sarah is more socially-conscious than some of her peers, and increasingly attuned to the limits of her understanding and empathy.

One of my favourite things about Clare's novel is her insistence that women writing is a meaningful act, that with a relatively short history of having these words valorized, and in a context where access to voice is still profoundly uneven, telling stories matters. But how we tell them, she reminds us, has ethical stakes, and we can learn to do better.